Sea-level rise and human migration

Environmental Research Letters, 2018

Climate change is expected to impact the habitability of many places around the world in significant and unprecedented ways in the coming decades. While previous studies have provided estimates of populations potentially exposed to various climate impacts, little work has been done to assess the number of people that may actually be displaced or where they will choose to go. Here we modify a diffusion-based model of human mobility in combination with population, geographic, and climatic data to estimate the sources, destinations, and flux of potential migrants as driven by sea level rise (SLR) in Bangladesh in the years 2050 and 2100. Using only maps of population and elevation, we predict that 0.9 million people (by year 2050) to 2.1 million people (by year 2100) could be displaced by direct inundation and that almost all of this movement will occur locally within the southern half of the country. We also find that destination locations should anticipate substantial additional demands on jobs (594 000), housing (197 000), and food (783 × 10 9 calories) by mid-century as a result of those displaced by SLR. By linking the sources of migrants displaced by SLR with their likely destinations, we demonstrate an effective approach for predicting climate-driven migrant flows, especially in data-limited settings.

2014

"The implications of global warming have become increasingly clear. Yet, great inconsistencies are emerging amongst the world’s nations as to their policy responses to the perceived threats from global warming and other environmental changes. The consensus view that once may have existed in some nations and imposed on others, appears now to be breaking down. Exceedingly costly socio-economic policy mistakes will be the inevitable corollary of this world-wide scientific consensus breakdown as the policy responses of the different nations change in how they adapt to climate change risks. These inconsistent responses are now visible all over the world. A good example is the costly decision by Germany to demolish all their nuclear power facilities (due to the perceived flooding risks by the sea) in the aftermath of the Fukushima incident in Japan; whereas the UK is introducing new nuclear facilities in the Bristol Channel, where flooding risks are high and a tsunami struck in 1607. As a result of immensely costly policy decisions by Germany and the UK, thousands of people in both countries are already on the move in search of new homes and jobs: some to build nuclear reactors, while some wish to remove them for the ‘good’ of our environment. Similar examples are found across the world in many different situations due to the climate-driven uncertainties. A major source of uncertainty is the sea level. If Arctic meltdown proceeds unchecked, then some scientists say that we could have several metres of sea level rise, even by mid-century. This is very problematical for low-lying conurbations. For example Egypt is considering rebuilding Cairo inland in order to allow evacuation of the Nile Delta in case ofsea level rise. Furthermore, the disappearance of sea ice in summer may enhance the break-off of large volumes of ice from the Greenland ice sheet, sufficient to cause tsunamis in the North Atlantic. What is an appropriate response? "

IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2024

This study explores the adaptation process of small-scale fishing families in Demak, Java, in response to sea level rise and tidal floods. Qualitative research methods are used to investigate the factors influencing families' decisions to relocate. Findings indicate that families employ home elevation as a short-term adaptation measure, but severe floods eventually lead to the challenging decision of permanent migration. The study highlights the interplay of physical, social, and economic factors in shaping migration decisions. While short-term strategies provide partial relief, migration emerges as a vital long-term resilience strategy. Mitigation efforts involve coastal protection, wetland restoration, land use planning, and climate change adaptation measures. The study emphasizes the need for tailored, context-specific strategies and integration of sea level rise considerations into broader climate change mitigation efforts. Overall, understanding migration decisions and implementing targeted disaster mitigation strategies are crucial for enhancing the resilience of coastal communities facing sea level rise.

Nature Climate Change

Against the background of possible substantial sea-level rise, an important question is, to what extent are coastal societies able to adapt? This question is often answered in the negative by referring to sinking islands and submerged mega-cities. While these risks are real, the picture is incomplete because it lacks consideration of adaptation. This Perspective explores societies' abilities to adapt to 21st century sea-level rise by integrating perspectives from coastal engineering, economics, finance and social sciences, and provides a comparative analysis of a set of cases that vary in technological limits, and economic, financing, and social conflict barriers to coastal adaptation. Recent literature has reinforced concerns about possible substantial sea-level rise (SLR) due to rapid melting of ice sheets 1 which may lead to 21 st century global mean SLR of 2 m or more. 2-4 Discomfortingly, the potential for high-end SLR may remain even if the ambition of the Paris Agreement to limit the temperature increase well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels is met. This is due to the large uncertainties associated with ice-sheet responses and sea levels continuing to rise for thousands of years even if greenhousegas concentration will be stabilized during the 21st century. 5,6 Against this background, an important question is to what extent societies are able to adapt and maintain human settlements safe from SLR and associated extremes during the 21 st century. Following the current sea-level rise literature and the media, this question is often seemingly answered in the negative by referring to, for example, the "complete flooding and submergence of entire mega-cities." 5 or showing emblematic cities around the world submerged by the sea. 7 While these headlines illustrate that SLR may constitute a major challenge to coastal societies, they are incomplete and possibly misleading in that they neglect coastal adaptation. This is specifically true because adaptation could reduce some coastal impacts by several orders of magnitude. 8,9 Furthermore, coastal societies have a long history of adapting to environmental change and local SLR because coasts are amongst the most dynamic environments on Earth. 10 For example, a number of coastal mega-cities in river deltas have experienced, and adapted to, relative SLR of several meters caused by land subsidence during the 20 th century. 11

Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration, 2018

Scientific Reports

Sea level rise (SLR) will increase adaptation needs along low-lying coasts worldwide. Despite centuries of experience with coastal risk, knowledge about the effectiveness and feasibility of societal adaptation on the scale required in a warmer world remains limited. This paper contrasts end-century SLR risks under two warming and two adaptation scenarios, for four coastal settlement archetypes (Urban Atoll Islands, Arctic Communities, Large Tropical Agricultural Deltas, Resource-Rich Cities). We show that adaptation will be substantially beneficial to the continued habitability of most low-lying settlements over this century, at least until the RCP8.5 median SLR level is reached. However, diverse locations worldwide will experience adaptation limits over the course of this century, indicating situations where even ambitious adaptation cannot sufficiently offset a failure to effectively mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions.

Journal of Disaster Research, 2019

Atoll countries in the Pacific, namely Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu, will become sources of climate migrants in the foreseeable future. This study aimed to examine if people in these atoll countries were, are, or will be ready to successfully relocate to foreign countries by re-establishing their lives and livelihoods in a new environment. An international collaborative research project was launched and implemented from 2017 to 2019. Case studies were conducted in Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands as the origin of climate migrants and in Fiji and the USA as their destination. It was found that a number of legal tools and practical policy measures are available for countries to alleviate the struggles of environmental migrants, despite the lack of a comprehensive legal framework that protects environmental migrants by allowing them to move to other countries. In addition, 65% of the college and university students in the Marshall Islands indicated education...

Climatic Change, 2008

Previous research has postulated that climate change will lead to mass migration. However, the linkages postulated between the two have not been explicitly demonstrated but have rather been derived from 'common sense'. In this paper, the connection between climate change and migration via two mechanisms, sea level rise and floods, is investigated and depicted in conceptual models. In both cases, a connection can be traced and the linkages are made explicit. However, the study also clearly shows that the connection is by no means deterministic but depends on numerous factors relating to the vulnerability of the people and the region in question.

The participation of individuals contributes significantly to the success of sea level rise adaptation. This study therefore addresses what influences people's likelihood of relocating away from low-lying areas in response to rising sea levels. The analysis was based on a survey conducted in the City of Panama Beach in Florida (USA). Survey items relate to people's risk perception, hazard experience, threat appraisal, and coping appraisal, whose theoretical background is Protection Motivation Theory. Descriptive and correlation analysis was first performed to highlight critical factors which were then examined by a multinomial Logit model. Results show that sea level rise awareness is the major explanatory variable. Coping appraisal is qualitatively viewed as a strong predictor for action, while threat appraisal is statistically significant in driving relocation intention. These factors should be integrated in current risk communication regarding sea level rise.

Migration Policy Institute Feature, 2010

Most scientists agree that global warming affects ecological systems, but there is less certainty about its social effects, especially regarding human mobility. Yet this has not prevented a number of scholars, multilateral agencies, and nongovernmental organizations from making alarming predictions that climate change processes will trigger historically unprecedented waves of mass migration. The more widely cited estimates for the number of people displaced by 2050 range from 50 million (UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security) to 200 million (International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Stern Review). If the higher estimates pan out, climate change-related migration could dwarf current numbers of refugees and internally displaced people-about 45 million and 9 million by United Nations estimates, respectively. While there are no scientifically verified estimates of the number of people that will be displaced by climate change, several studies by UN agencies, IOM, and NGOs, including an influential report published in 2009, already show evidence that environmentally induced migration is occurring. Also, despite controversy surrounding the specifics of climate change data, there is no evidence to contradict the expected trend of continued global warming for at least a few decades to come. This article will examine the complex links between climate change and migration, how and where these links influence current and future migration patterns, and some of the problems with predicting future flows. It will also outline some current policy approaches and look at where the debate is headed. The Climate Change-Migration Nexus Migration has helped humans cope with environmental changes, such as droughts and floods, for centuries. The frequency, severity, and duration of such changes affect the broad types of migration patterns-temporary, permanent, internal, or internationalthat take place. The prevailing tendency thus far has been toward more circular, internal movements of people from mostly rural to urban areas and within national boundaries or regions. These trends are evident, for example, in the seasonal labor migration of Central American, Mexican, and West African farmers to compensate for lower agricultural productivity in rural areas, as well as in the temporary displacement of thousands of Bangladeshis to their capital, Dhaka, in response to annual monsoon floods. However, severe environmental damage, whether natural or manmade, can leave populations with little recourse but to move permanently and en-masse. This happened in the 1930s Dust Bowl in the Great Plains of the United States. Below-average rainfall, accompanied by the Great Depression, resulted in the widespread failure of small farms and the migration of about 300,000 "Okies" to California. Currently, people are beginning to leave some small island nations in the Pacific with low elevations because the islands are suffering high rates of coastal erosion and experiencing rising sea levels. Environmental degradation is also increasingly common in those areas, such as in West Africa and Haiti, where depleted agricultural land can no

Nature Climate Change, 2019

level rise is similar under different emission scenarios 1, (Fig. ). In the second half of this century and beyond, projections of sea-level change increasingly diverge 1, . As we approach this mid-century mark, we should have a better understanding of the emissions and sea-level trajectories that the world will follow for the remainder of the twenty-first century and beyond, and thus be in a better position to account for adaptation interventions and migration in that more distant future (Fig. ). In all cases, representing the feedbacks of policy, population and sea level will be imperative as we build comprehensive models capable of guiding policy. These refinements hinge on the convergence of international organizations, governments, advocacy groups and scholars of various disciplines working to deliver timely and purpose-specific information on coastal risk, adaptation policy and evolving migration dynamics.

Routledge International Handbook of Human Migration Studies, 2nd Ed. (S. Nawyn & S. Gold, Eds.)

It is now widely recognized that climate change will reconfigure our physical and social landscapes in ways that we are just beginning to understand, and that it will directly and indirectly influence human migration patterns across geographic regions and the socio-economic spectrum. Exactly how climate change will affect migration, what climate-related migration will look like, and how scholars might go about studying it, however, remain points of contention. In this chapter, we identify some key threads in the burgeoning literature on climate change and human migration, including the influence of climate change on migration decisions and patterns, the challenges of empirically measuring and predicting the scale of climate migration, the likely patterns climate migration will take, and some of the looming governance and human rights questions posed by climate migration. Additionally, because both climate change and migration occur within a dynamic and highly unequal social, political, and economic landscape, we highlight some of the ways in which some communities are rendered more vulnerable than others in the face of both climate change and climate migration, as well as the ways in which such vulnerability is produced and perpetuated.

This short paper looks at the legal implications of sea level rise relating to human mobility and discusses related developments at the UN Sixth Committee and the International Law Commission.

2017

Climate change is a complex, multi-causal hazard which interacts with other factors to increase the drivers of migration. This paper assesses the relationship between climate change and international migration in Asia and the Pacific to inform discussions for the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. It draws primarily on peer-reviewed publications and reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and secondly, on well-designed commissioned studies. First, the paper outlines how climate change is affecting the region. Second, it clarifies conceptual challenges relating to climate change as a driver of migration. Third, it identifies at least six different ways climate change is impacting international migration. The final sections outline how these challenges are being addressed at global, regional, national and local levels. The conclusion makes recommendations aimed at supporting people to live safely and decently in their communities of origin for as long as possible, to limit the need to use migration out of necessity, rather than choice, and to ensure policy responses are based on localised understandings of climate risks, adaptation options and potential migration pathways.